{"id":33798,"date":"2025-09-23T20:17:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-23T20:17:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/33798\/"},"modified":"2025-09-23T20:17:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-23T20:17:07","slug":"a-look-inside-the-ai-strategies-at-the-new-york-times-and-the-washington-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/33798\/","title":{"rendered":"A look inside the AI strategies at The New York Times and The Washington Post"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Digiday<\/a> held the most recent edition of its Digiday Publishing Summit<\/a> in Miami last week, and it\u2019s been rolling out highlights<\/a> from many of the sessions. You\u2019ll be shocked to learn that one big area of focus was AI. Two of them make for interesting paired reading \u2014 peeks into the AI strategies of The New York Times<\/a> and The Washington Post<\/a>, the country\u2019s two top general interest newspapers.<\/p>\n

First, the Times<\/a>, where my old Nieman Lab colleague<\/a> Zach Seward<\/a> is editorial director of A.I. initiatives<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Using AI for research and investigations is \u201cby far the biggest use of our resources and I think the biggest opportunity right now when it comes to AI in media,\u201d Seward said. His team mostly works by helping a reporter use AI technology for one project, and then creating a repeatable process from that experience for others in the newsroom to use.<\/p>\n

The New York Times also has an open Slack channel that anyone from the newsroom can join to ask questions and share use cases \u2014 ranging from \u201cHow can I get Gemini?\u201d to one bureau chief inspiring another across the world with an idea for how they\u2019re using AI technology.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not trying to be AI boosters. In fact, quite the opposite. I think there\u2019s a lot of caution. A lot of time we spend cautioning people about uses of AI, both [in the] legal and editorial senses,\u201d he said. \u201cBut if we can have you leave a session saying, \u2018I\u2019m still pretty concerned about this whole environmental issue and maybe like destroying humanity thing \u2013 but in the meantime, it\u2019s going to let me transcribe handwritten notes in Arabic that I took messy iPhone photos of while I was on a reporting trip, and that\u2019s pretty cool.\u2019 And no reporter is going to say no to a competitive advantage, which I think is the theme of what we\u2019re trying to build for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the Post<\/a>, Sam Han<\/a> was named chief AI officer in June<\/a> after spending eight years in related roles. One of his team\u2019s areas of focus has been on building an AI-powered paywall that can adjust to an individual reader\u2019s usage patterns to optimize when to ask for payment. He said the AI paywall delivers \u201ca 20% increase in customer lifetime value\u201d over its predecessor. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe best benefit of having that is no more meetings to decide what rules [to set as the basis for the paywall]. Thanksgiving sale\u2019s coming up \u2014 how should we change the paywall rules to accommodate more subscription during the sales price? We will have meetings after meetings after meetings, and then the executive with the largest voice will win, right? That\u2019s all gone now. It\u2019s all driven by machine learning.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOur subscription marketing team created flexible access products, [such as] weekly pass, daily pass. We are experimenting with pay-per-article now. We want to bring all those into the paywall decision. It\u2019s not just showing a paywall. It\u2019s a paywall containing which products.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have very strict guidelines saying, if it\u2019s business-critical, sensitive information, use a language model hosted by us internally. Otherwise, you can use enterprise version of ChatGPT and so on. If documents are in Google Docs already, it\u2019s already safe, we have correct classification of document and so on, so then you\u2019re allowed to use Gemini to do certain tasks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Photo of the U.S. Eastern Seaboard at night \u2014 with Washington just left of center and New York the large metropolis on the right \u2014 via NASA<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Digiday held the most recent edition of its Digiday Publishing Summit in Miami last week, and it\u2019s been…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33799,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,125],"class_list":["post-33798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33798\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}